We choose our friends but we don’t choose our parents. Nor do they choose us. It’s a pretty fraught relationship, sometimes, that between parent and child. Perhaps “love-hate” best describes it — hopefully with love dominant. Confucius said — and what Confucius said is ...

A recurring news story over the past several years concerns claims of the harassment of Japanese nationals residing on the East and West coasts of the United States. Most appear to have originated from municipalities where South Korean immigrants and Korean-Americans have successfully campaigned ...

“Her lips languorous like a loose-wound spool, the fragrance of her perfume reaching to the skies. And how lovely when she moves, swaying back and forth. … When compared to this creature, a man’s wife can hardly seem more than a salted fish past ...

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Is Japan a strange country? What a strange question for a country to ask itself! The question implies the answer. Merely to raise it is to invite an affirmative reply, as Shukan Gendai magazine this month is by no means the first to prove. ...

The oft-seen expression ichioku sō-chūryū translates roughly as “the perception of ‘the 100 million,’ i.e., the entire nation, as belonging to the middle class.” This perception was never meant to be all-inclusive — certainly Japan has individuals with extreme wealth and others who suffer ...

In July 1995, a special edition of Aera magazine reflected on 50 years of postwar evolution. Education was among the topics covered. Two facts grab the viewer of a photograph showing an elementary school class settling into a brand new academic year. It’s April, ...

All societies are repressive — some brutally, others benignly, more or less. No society allows us to fully express our true selves. Some societies squash our true selves. Even those that don’t will at least keep them in check to some degree. Society could ...

On the morning of Feb. 20, police were summoned to the grassy, elevated bank of the Tama River, which forms the boundary between Tokyo and Kawasaki. They found the naked body of 13-year-old junior high school student Ryota Uemura, dead of multiple stab wounds. ...

Seventy years after World War II ended, should we be thinking about war or about peace? World War I, in its day, was called “the war to end all wars.” It was not. Would World War II be? Two nations, in its aftermath, went ...

In a controversial column by 83-year-old author Ayako Sono that appeared in the Feb. 11 issue of the Sankei Shimbun under the headline “Maintain a ‘suitable distance,'” Sono suggested that when and if Japan changes its immigration policies to accept more foreign workers, they ...

“More than diamonds, I want peace.” Kenji Goto knew hell as well as anyone who doesn’t have to live there. He was a journalist. His place, he felt, was where suffering was greatest, misery deepest, evil ugliest, cruelty most feral. He covered genocide in ...

The 67-second video on YouTube opens with a black slate that reads, “A Message to Japan.” The video then shows a kneeling journalist, Kenji Goto, clad in an orange outfit. Behind him, flaunting a knife, is the masked executioner from the Islamic State group ...